This report is a guidebook with selected Q&A aims at finding out what kind of topics do philosophers from different school focus on.

The whole dataset :the dataset for the Philosophy Data Project contains over 300,000 sentences from over 50 texts spanning 10 major schools of philosophy. You can read more about the project on http://www.philosophydata.com/.

This report is prepared with the following environmental settings.

print(R.version)
##                _                           
## platform       x86_64-apple-darwin17.0     
## arch           x86_64                      
## os             darwin17.0                  
## system         x86_64, darwin17.0          
## status                                     
## major          4                           
## minor          1.1                         
## year           2021                        
## month          08                          
## day            10                          
## svn rev        80725                       
## language       R                           
## version.string R version 4.1.1 (2021-08-10)
## nickname       Kick Things

Question 1: Which schools are we going to explore?what does each school consist of?

For me,I am a totally beginner for philosophy and philosophors,especially considering the fact that I am an international student.Although I know about the famous philosophors like plato and aristotle,yet it is important to explore their philosophy from the perspective of schools.

#what are the schools in this dataset
ps.schools = unlist(unique(ps.data$school))
#what are the titles in this dataset
ps.titles =unlist(unique(ps.data$title))

ps.school.split = split(ps.data,ps.data$school)
ps.school.table = as.data.frame(table(ps.data$school))
colnames(ps.school.table)=c("school","count")
ps.school.table = ps.school.table[order(ps.school.table$count,decreasing =  TRUE),]
barplot(ps.school.table$count, las = 2, names.arg = ps.school.table$school,
        col ="lightblue", main ="Most frequent schools",
        ylab = "Sentence Count")

Question 2: How philosophors think about the world in general?

Firstly,we can see how philosophers think about the world by analyzing the frequency of certain words appearing in the sentences。

#Since the data has been lower-cased and tokenized,we can use the tokenized texts and remove all 
ps.corpus = Corpus(VectorSource(ps.data$tokenized_txt))
ps.corpus = tm_map(ps.corpus, removeNumbers)
ps.corpus = tm_map(ps.corpus, removePunctuation)
ps.corpus = tm_map(ps.corpus, removeWords, c("the", "and","also","two", "one","can","may","will","must","might","just","thus","therefore",stopwords("english")))
ps.corpus =  tm_map(ps.corpus, stripWhitespace)
ps.tdm.all<-TermDocumentMatrix(ps.corpus)
ps.tdm.tidy=tidy(ps.tdm.all)
ps.tdm.overall=summarise(group_by(ps.tdm.tidy, term), sum(count))
#word frequency 
ps.wordfreq <- data.frame(word =ps.tdm.overall$term ,freq=ps.tdm.overall$`sum(count)`)
ps.wordfreq <- ps.wordfreq[order(ps.wordfreq$freq,decreasing = TRUE),]
head(ps.wordfreq,20)
##            word  freq
## 79542    things 17482
## 47112       man 16152
## 80145      time 15307
## 26632      even 14461
## 29358     first 13880
## 53277       now 13041
## 69636       say 12856
## 87419       way 12854
## 51420    nature 12796
## 88698     world 12088
## 65068    reason 11464
## 88406   without 11432
## 79530     thing 11275
## 73614 something 10841
## 3537    another 10466
## 45095      like 10265
## 32924      good 10214
## 72488     since 10011
## 57335      part  9838
## 11089      case  9596
barplot(ps.wordfreq[1:20,]$freq, las = 2, names.arg = ps.wordfreq[1:20,]$word,
        col ="lightblue", main ="Most frequent words",
        ylab = "Word frequencies")

#wordcloud in general
wordcloud(ps.tdm.overall$term, ps.tdm.overall$`sum(count)`,
          scale=c(3,0.5),
          max.words=100,
          min.freq=100,
          random.order=FALSE,
          rot.per=0.3,
          use.r.layout=T,
          random.color=FALSE,
          colors=brewer.pal(8,"Dark2"))

We can see various philosophy topics in the high frequency words: “things”and “man”,“world”、“nature”、“object”、“subject”and so on; As we would like to identify interesting words for each sentence, we use [TF-IDF]to weigh each term within each sentence. It highlights terms that are more specific for a particular sentence.

# compute TF-IDF weighted document-term matrices for individual sentences
ps.dtm <- DocumentTermMatrix(ps.corpus,
                          control = list(weighting = weightTfIdf,stopwords = TRUE))
#ps.dtm=tidy(dtm)
ps.dtm = removeSparseTerms(ps.dtm , 0.99)
freq = data.frame(sort(colSums(as.matrix(ps.dtm)), decreasing=TRUE))
wordcloud(rownames(freq), freq[,1], max.words=100, colors=brewer.pal(5, "Dark2"))

For each sentence,the “say” outstands,it seems that a lot of famous quoting exist through widsom’s words

Question 3:How do philosophors from different school think about the world?What are the difference

For school analytic:

creat.wordcloud(ps.school.split[1],ps.data,names(ps.school.split[1]))

For school analytic:“theory”,“sense”,“truth”,“sense”,“fact” are the keywords

For school aristotle:

For school aristotle:“will”,“must”,“reason”,“nature”,“animal” are the keywords

For school capitalism:

For school capitalism: Price,money ,capital are the main topics

For school communism:

For school communism: labour,value, production,capital are the main topics

For school continental:

For school continental:“madness”,“form”,“relationship” appear the most

For school empiricism:

For school empiricism: “ideas/idea”,“reason” appear frequently

For school feminism:

For school feminism:without doubt,“women/woman”appear most,“man”,“love”,“children” appear frequently

For school german_idealism:

For school german_idealism:quite abstract and conceptual words like “consciousness”,“self” and “law”

For school nietzsche:

For school nietzsche:“life”“virtue”“god”“love”“soul”

For school phenomenology:

For school phenomenology:“knowledge”“experience”“conciousness”

For school plato:

For school plato:it is interesting “socrates” appears a lot of time

For school rationalism:

For school rationalism:Why “god” appear most here?Maybe it is always used as counterexamples

For school stoicism:

For school stoicism:you can guess this school is from old greek period from the words“thou”“thyself”“thee”

Conclusions

  1. Philosophy focus mainly on conceptual things

  2. Different school of philosophers have their own topic